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Announced at the Student Reading of the Poetry Summer School, the winner of this year’s Prize is Tara Bergin for her book This is Yarrow (Carcanet Press).
Ms. Bergin is from Dublin. She recently completed her PhD thesis at Newcastle University (UK) on Ted Hughes’s translations of János Pilinszky. This is Yarrow is published by Carcanet Press.

The Seamus Heaney Prize for Poetry for 2014 included a check for £1,000.

In addition, the winner is invited to read at Glucksman Ireland House at New York University for the fourth annual Tom Quinlan Lecture in Poetry on November 6. The chairman of the judges this year was Professor Ciaran Carson, director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry. His fellow judges were Professor Paul Farley from the University of Lancaster and Professor Paula Meehan, the current incumbent of the Ireland chair of poetry.

The judges said of the competition, “It was a year when there were outstanding entries for this prize, powerful collections that made the judges' decision very difficult. It was an especially strong year for storytellers: the narrative impulse was the central energy in many of the collections. Through all the sifting, calibrating and circling round it was Tara Bergin's book This is Yarrow that held us in thrall. The poems are suffused with the sense of the poet moving way outside the known or knowing world to bring back strange and urgent news; poetry that once we hear it, we wonder how we ever did without it.”

Tara Bergin will deliver the fourth annual Tom Quinlan Lecture at Glucksman Ireland House NYU on “Ireland as a State of Mind,” examining the powerful allure of the poetry of exile, and exploring the impact that leaving can have on a writer’s development. Drawing on her recent academic study, as well as her personal experience of moving away from what Joyce called “dear, dirty Dublin,” Tara Bergin will conclude the lecture with a short reading from her collection This is Yarrow.

Glucksman Ireland House NYU established the Tom Quinlan Lecture in Poetry in 2011 to honor a public school teacher in Philadelphia, a lover of poetry, and Glucksman Ireland House member since 1997; the lecture is endowed by his family. The late Seamus Heaney attended the opening of the annual lecture, which invites the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize-winner to NYU. For more information, please contact the NYU press relations officer listed with this announcement.